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Comment on A cotton T-shirt takes roughly 2,700 litres of water to produce

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Typical shit

Cotton: About ~1500 litres if you exclude rain.

Polyester~30 litres (inclusive entire extraction chain).

Another way to put it:

Cotton: 750 almonds

Polyester: 15 almonds

5-250 California almonds

I'd rather have a good cotton shirt than a bag of almonds.

I'm not knocking on consumer choice. I'd rather have 5 high performance synesthetic petchem shirt summoned from fossil than a nice cotton shirt that emits more and sheds more microplastic. More to point out how stupid agriculture water use can be. Also golf courses.

What microplastic is in pure cotton? My best shirts lasted two decades. 100% cotton. Not mixed fabric or even elastan.

How much water gets contaminated forever with microplastic due to the BS mixed fabric hype?

Pure cotton uses 50x more water / pesticides and associated damage to water table. Sure it's more transient but we know pesticides is bad, we _think_ microplastics is bad, but only in the vague, it upsets the environment in some systemic way, not heavy water and pesticide use wall definitely fuck up some local balance way.

Highend synthetic tech fabric will mechanically outlast a cotton shirt. This not even debatable outside of anecdotes. We KNOW with certainty material properties, synthetics can be significantly - not even in the same realm - more hard wearing than the best cotton. Manufactures just cheap out, like they do cheap cotton.

I don't wanna wear plastic

so now plastic is the greener choice? what a time to be alive

I think tstill more emissions per shirt, more microplastics, but in terms of water use, more green.

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